Computing at Light Speed: The World's First Photonic Neural Network Has Arrived

As developments are made in neural computing, we can continue to push artificial intelligence further. A fairly recent technology, neural networks have been taking over the world of data processing, giving machines advanced capabilities such as object recognition, face recognition, natural language processing, and machine translation. These sound like simple things, but they were way out of reach for processors until scientists began to find way to make machines behave more like human brains in the way they learned and handled data. To do this, scientists have been focusing on building neuromorphic chips, circuits that operate in a similar fashion to neurons. Now, a team at Princeton University has found a way to build a neuromorphic chip that uses light to mimic neurons in the brain, and their study has been detailed in Cornell University Library.